Wesleyan University The Honors College Exploring the Superunknown: Composition and the Music of Soundgarden by Emily Michelle Weiss Class of 2011 A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in Music Middletown, Connecticut April 12, 2011 Table of Contents Acknowledgements.......................................................................................................... 3 Introduction........................................................................................................................ 4 Developing Metrical Complexity and Flexibility ..................................................21 Shifting and Emotion in “The Day I Tried To Live” ..............................................49 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................62 Appendix A ........................................................................................................................68 Appendix B ........................................................................................................................69 Bibliography.....................................................................................................................72 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Yonatan Malin, for guiding me through this endeavor; it is with his insight, guidance, advice, and support that this project was made possible. I would also like to thank Jane Alden and the other tremendous educators and staff of the Wesleyan University Music Department for giving me the tools and the mindset to approach this material and come away a more learned person. Additionally, I want to extend endless thanks to all others who helped me with this project in any way, shape or form, especially Graham Richman, Sam Backer, Sandy Brough, Aaron Paige, Noel Garrett, and Dan St. Clair. Last but not least, this project could not have come together without the unwavering support and love of my family. From brainstorming to editing and formatting, to helping me through rough patches, Mom, Dad, Allie, and Ava, I owe you more than I can say, and I could not have done this without you. And Cam, thank you for everything. 3 Introduction If this isn’t what you see, it doesn’t make you blind If this doesn’t make you feel, it doesn’t mean you’ve died If this doesn’t make you free, it doesn’t mean you’re tied If this doesn’t take you down, it doesn’t mean you’re high If this doesn’t make you smile, you don’t have to cry If this isn’t making sense, it doesn’t make it lies Alive in the Superunknown First it steals your mind And then it steals your soul - “Superunknown,” Superunknown, 1994 * * * On the title track from their 1994 album Superunknown, Soundgarden describe an elusive metaphysical state imbued with liminality and ambiguity, without ever explicitly telling the listener what the “superunknown” is. The idea of the ‘superunknown’ represents what ‘grunge’ was to many people: a massive musical and social phenomenon that caused the different people who responded to it, viewed it, loved it, hated it, understood it, and reflected on it to do so in widely varied ways. Grunge was different things to different people, and Soundgarden was no exception. As a hugely successful band that emerged from Seattle in the mid-1980s, but only achieved international notoriety in the early 1990s, they took a unique approach to grunge music, and to rock music more generally. The in depth musical analysis that is the focus of this paper shows how Soundgarden and their musical ‘superunknown’ evolved over the course of their career. 4 The major grunge bands shared a common musical style in their early years, due primarily to the nature of the local Seattle scene. When grunge as a genre began to outshine grunge as a musical style and local scene, these major bands started on divergent paths, growing and developing naturally towards their own musical goals. The unique way in which Soundgarden diverged from the early grunge sound was through an inward focus on composition that eventually led them towards increased complexity and flexibility in their compositional frameworks. Soundgarden took the same kernels of what made up early grunge and developed them differently; glimpses of the compositional complexities that would develop later in their music were present in their early songs, but as they continued as a band these characteristics became much more prominent. Soundgarden, over the course of their career, developed uniquely flexible compositional approaches. Instead of metrical systems existing as rigid grids to which music must conform, for example, Soundgarden composed music that treated meter as a flexible system that they were able to modify and adapt as needed. As part of this, many of their songs employ multiple meters, moving among them or layering them on top of each other for different effects. The layering of meters and their interaction through time creates a kind of complexity that is rare in rock. The kind of complexity and flexibility present in their use of meter is evidence of a general compositional framework that applies to many aspects of their music. It is this complex and flexible compositional 5 framework that sets them apart from other grunge bands as they develop their own musical style over the course of their career. What is ‘grunge’? Grunge is a musical style, a genre of music, and a local music scene, all of which emerged from the greater Seattle area in the mid-1980s, which broke into the national consciousness in the early 1990s, and dissolved into popular culture over the course of the decade. The complexity of this single descriptor lies in the relationship between its threefold definition and the inherent variance within it. Musical style, in this case, refers to aspects of the music itself, including form, instrumentation, timbre, tone, harmony, and other fundamental aspects of composition that contribute to how grunge sounds at the rawest level. Genre is a slightly more complicated descriptor that builds on aspects of musical style. In his detailed article on genre, Jim Samson defines it as “a class, type or category, sanctioned by convention,” stressing its role as an organizing and communicative principle that contains information about the music to which it is applied, information that is garnered through repetition of similar characteristics1. In Western Art music, this may simply refer to common musical forms or common modes and arenas for production, depending on the narrowness of the genre at hand. However, in popular music, another layer complicates Samson’s primarily philosophical discussion: within the popular music sphere, genres are used by record companies to market a product, 1 Jim Samson, “Genre,” Grove Music Online. 6 grouping together bands, albums, and songs that have similar appeal on some level, be it musical, geographical, or otherwise. In the case of grunge, the musical styles associated with certain bands labeled as grunge spread to other bands, that then through media and other sources became part of the ‘grunge’ genre. This is fundamentally different than their participation in the grunge scene, which was a specific musical phenomenon, localized in time and place. The grunge scene consists of a number of individuals with similar musical influences and interests and their musical and social interactions with each other, from playing in the same bands, and attending concerts at the same clubs, to becoming involved in other aspects of music production, such as start-up record companies, photographing concerts or making album artwork. The nature of ‘grunge’ as a scene clearly relates to the shared aspects of musical style, which also relates to the creation of the grunge genre by sources within and outside the original local community. In conceptualizing grunge and examining how Soundgarden fits into its many aspects, it is important to keep these three interrelated yet distinct facets in mind. With the understanding that grunge is at once a style, a genre, and a localized musical scene, we return to the question ‘what is grunge?’ in search of more specificity. Allmusic’s anonymous writer defines grunge first as a musical style that is exemplified by certain bands2. S/He writes: Using the sludgy, murky sound of the Stooges and Black Sabbath as a foundation, Grunge was a hybrid of heavy metal and punk. Though the guitars were straight from early '70s metal, the aesthetic of grunge was far from metal. Both the lyrical approach and musical attack of grunge 2 Allmusic. “Explore: Grunge.” AMG. Accessed April 12, 2011. 7 were adopted from punk, particularly the independent ideals of early '80s American hardcore. The first wave of grunge bands -- Green River, Mudhoney, Soundgarden -- were heavier than the second, which began with Nirvana. Nirvana was more melodic than their predecessors and they also had signature stop-start dynamics, which became a genre convention nearly as recognizable as fuzzy, distorted guitars. After Nirvana crossed over into the mainstream, grunge lost many of its independent and punk connections and became the most popular style of hard rock in the '90s.3 Although this description successfully interprets the musical influences that best characterize grunge as a musical style and accurately captures its relationship to the genre as a whole, it distorts the historical development